For what it is worth, it wasn't a lack of protective coating that made laser discs less reliable than CDs or DVDs.  In addition to gradual improvement of the technology, two key breakthroughs for CDs was that they were digital (Laserdiscs were analog) and also incorporated the Sony patented cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon code for error detection and error correction. This meant small scratches no longer impacted the output.

Laserdisc providers didn't intentionally price themselves out of the market. They were cumbersome (large players, needed multiple sides / discs per movie, delicate discs); a one trick pony (as mentioned, can't record TV, home videos, porn); and had more centralized manufacturing (complicated mastering process and moulding of multilayer discs, vs. just buying a bunch of recorders and duplicating porn or other non-mainstream content).  Their market was limited to videophiles.  They never got enough widespread adoption to drive the costs down as happened with VCRs and later DVDs.  

So I don't think you can simply say Laserdisc was "better technology" at the time.  And if you want to move to the underlying technology of "recording data using bumps on a piece of plastic that is decoded by a laser reading reflectively" vs "recording data using magnetic storage", well, the laptop I use to listen to music and watch movies only has the latter technology, and my other laptop has neither!

But back to Monero - while I was typing this, nice little rally!